CHAPTER IX. US LANDED PROPRIETORS
To the best of my ability I have been quoting Lady Maude verbatim; but if unintentionally I have permitted any erroneous quotations to creep into her remarks they will be corrected before these lines reach the reader's eye, because the next time she and Scott come over—they are neighbors of ours out here in Westchester—I mean to ask her to t read copy on this book. They drop in on us quite frequently and we talk furnishings, and Scott sits by and smokes and occasionally utters low mocking sounds under his breath, for as yet he has not been entirely won over to antiques. There are times when I fear that Scott, though a most worthy person in all other regards, is hopelessly provincial. Well, I was a trifle provincial myself before I took the cure.
Perhaps I should say that sometimes we talk furnishings with Mistress Maude, but more often we talk farming problems, with particular reference to our own successes and the failures of our friends in the same sphere of endeavor. Indeed, farming is the commonest topic of conversation in our vicinity. Because, like us, nearly all our friends in this part of the country were formerly flat dwellers and because, like us, all of them have done a lot of experimenting in the line of intensified, impractical agriculture since they moved to the country.
We seek to profit by one another's mistakes, and we do—that is, we profit by them to the extent of gloating over them. Then we go and make a few glaring mistakes on our own account, and when the word of it spreads through the neighborhood, seemingly on the wings of the wind, it is their turn to gloat. We have a regular Gloat Club with an open membership and no dues. If an amateur tiller of the soil and his wife drop in on us on a fine spring evening to announce that yesterday they had their first mess of green peas, whereas our pea vines are still in the blossoming state; or if in midsummer they come for the express purpose of informing us that they have been eating roasting ears for a week—they knowing full well that our early corn has suffered a backset—we compliment them with honeyed words, and outwardly our manner may bespeak a spirit of friendly congratulation, but in our souls all is bitterness.
After they have left one catches oneself saying to one's helpmeet: “Well, the Joneses are nice people in a good many respects. Jones would loan you the last cent he had on earth if you were in trouble and needed it, and in most regards Mrs. Jones is about as fine a little woman as you'd meet in a day's ride. But dog-gone it, I wish they didn't brag so much!” Then one of us opportunely recalls that last year their potatoes developed a slow and mysterious wasting disease resembling malignant tetter, which carried off the entire crop in its infancy, whereas we harvested a cellarful of wonderful praties free from skin blemishes of whatever sort; and warmed by that delectable recollection we cheer up a bit. And if our strawberries turn out well or our apple trees bear heavily or our cow has twin calves, both of the gentler sex, we lose no time in going about the countryside to spread the tidings, leaving in our wake saddened firesides and hearts all abrim with the concentrated essence of envy.
Practically all our little group specialize. We go in for some line that is absolutely guaranteed to be profitable until the expense becomes too great for a person of limited means any longer to bear up under. Then we drop that and specialize in another line, also recommended as being highly lucrative, for so long as we can afford it; and then we tackle something else again. It is a never-ending round of new experiences, because no matter how disastrously one's most recent experiment has tinned out the agricultural weeklies are constantly holding forth the advantages of a field as yet new and untried and morally insured to be one that will yield large and nourishing dividends. It is my sober conviction that the most inspired fiction writers in America—the men with the most buoyant imaginations—are the regular contributors to our standard agricultural journals. And next to them the most gifted romancers are the fellows who sell bulbs and seeds. They are not fabulists exactly, because fables have morals and frequently these persons have none, but they are inspired fancifiers, I'll tell the world.
Each succeeding season finds each family among us embarking upon some new and fascinating venture. For instance, I have one friend who this year went in for bees—Italian bees, I think he said they were, though why he should have been prejudiced against the native-born variety I cannot understand. He used to drop in at our place to borrow a little cooking soda—he was constantly running out of cooking soda at his house owing to using so much of it on his face and hands and his neck for poulticing purposes—and tell us what charming creatures bees were and how much honey he expected to lay by that fall. From what he said we gathered that the half had never been told by Maeterlinck about the engaging personal habits and captivating tribal customs of bees; bees, we gathered, were, as a race, perhaps a trifle quicktempered and hot-headed, or if not exactly hotheaded at least hot elsewhere, but ever ready to forgive and forget and, once the heat of passion had passed, to let bygones be bygones. A bee, it seemed from his accounts, was one creature that always stood ready to meet you halfway.
He finally gave up bee culture though, not because his enthusiasm had waned, for it did not, but for professional reasons solely. He is a distinguished actor and when he got the leading rôle in a new play it broke in on his study of the part to be dropping the manuscript every few minutes and grabbing up a tin dish and running out in an endeavor, by the power of music, to induce a flock of swarming bees to rehive themselves, or whatever it is bees are supposed to do when favored with a pie-pan solo. It seemed his bees had a perfect mania for swarming. The least little thing would set them off. There must have been too much artistic temperament about the premises for such emotional and flighty creatures as bees appear to be.